04 March 2018 1:31 AM

It wasn’t snow or ice that paralysed much of Britain during the past few days. It was lawyers. A great swirling storm of ambulance-chasers long ago descended on this country, blanketing common sense under a thick layer of solidified, litigious drivel.

I strongly suspect it was a terror of litigation that caused me to be trapped pointlessly for ages in an immobilised train on Thursday morning and then forced me into a huge diversion to get to work four hours late. At one point, as I rambled round Southern England in rattling carriages, I wondered if I might have to go through the Channel Tunnel to get to my desk.

I had assumed that some astonishing unexpected weather bomb had caused my problems. But when I looked into it, I found that a few miserable deposits of snow and ice on the platforms of Paddington Station in London had led to the closure, for several hours, of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway system.

How Brunel, that mighty engineer, who never saw an obstacle without wanting to overcome it, would have snorted with derision. I later checked with the Met Office, and they said the weather stations in Central London had reported no significant snowfall on the night before.

When I put this to Network Rail, they sent me a long statement repeatedly claiming they had faced ‘extreme conditions’ and offering this excuse:

‘The station was not temporarily closed because of snow. It was temporarily closed because a combination of snow, strong wind and freezing temperature created sheet ice on the platforms and areas of the concourse creating an unacceptable risk to station users, particularly passengers disembarking trains.’ They sent me pictures, showing a few pitiful patches of snow, as if these were evidence of a major crisis. I am not convinced. I think they are evidence of a fear of litigation.

As for ‘extreme conditions’, what can they mean? Those of us old enough to remember the genuinely devastating winter of 1962-3 know what cold weather can do here. Then, there was a 36-hour blizzard right across the country, with 80mph winds creating 20ft snowdrifts.

The upper reaches of the Thames froze solid enough for a car to be driven across the river at Oxford. Even the salt sea froze four miles out from Dunkirk and a mile out from Herne Bay in Kent. The snow lay without a break for two months.

In the North of Scotland, temperatures got below zero Fahrenheit, what we would have called 35 degrees of frost (minus 19.4 on the boring, crude Celsius scale), which is really cold.

That was a crisis. This isn’t. But a terrible fear of being sued has turned it into one, helped by the intolerant and stupid Green Dogma which has closed and demolished most of our perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations and brought us close to a totally needless gas shortage. Count yourselves lucky we still have some coal generation left, or there would have been serious shutdowns last week.

Many will have jeered at a school head who told his pupils not to touch the snow. But I sympathise with him. Ges Smith, from the Jo Richardson Community School in East London, flatly blamed the fear of lawsuits for his attitude. He told scoffing TV presenters reminiscing about their snowballing days: ‘What you didn’t operate in is a society where the first thing that happens is a parent on the phone to a company to make that claim, and I’m responsible.’

He is perfectly right, forced to be a ninny by a reasonable fear of the courts, imposed on him by insurers.

The NHS is near-crippled each year by compensation claims worth about £1.5billion that it can’t afford to fight, from lawyers on the make who are even allowed to advertise in hospital casualty waiting areas.

I just wish more people would say so. It was a stupid, predictably disastrous legal change. It transformed us in 25 years from being a robust, risk-taking adult society into a cringing, risk-averse health and safety despotism, where you close an entire railway in case someone slips on the snow and sues you.

For the record, this has nothing to do with Human Rights. It was done by a Tory government, which in 1995 triggered the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. Thanks again, John Major. It may have been hoping to save a bit off the Legal Aid budget. But the net cost to the country has been vastly greater.

So, in the end, it’s not the wrong kind of snow, or the wrong kind of wind. It’s the wrong kind of law. You could call it Storm Major, since it is probably the biggest single monument of his wretched government.

***

Still we tremble in fear about Russia, which has no interest in us and in any case has an economy the size of Italy’s. Ministers feel free to say practically anything about President Putin, and blame Moscow for any crime that’s going.

How odd that they, and the panicking media, say so little about China, a real threat to the wellbeing of the planet. China’s sinister leader Xi Jinping, a welcome guest at Buckingham Palace, has just declared himself President for life, a fact which Chinese journalists have now been sacked for reporting too prominently.

His is a regime that maintains a prison-camp gulag, imposes the death penalty on untold thousands after secret, unfair trials, censors its media, and patrols the internet for dissent. It is also expanding aggressively in the tense South China Sea, building huge and menacing new military bases there.

It hates any kind of criticism. It kidnaps publishers in foreign countries who bring out books critical of its leadership. It is slowly but surely strangling free speech, independent courts and protest in Hong Kong, in defiance of its treaty obligations.

Even in Britain, I know of student societies who, if they dare to allow anti-Chinese speakers, find themselves mysteriously packed by pro-Peking Chinese students. Russia, by contrast, merely laughs at our attacks on it.

We, who posture about Russia, do nothing about China’s growing repression and real aggression. In fact it is even worse. We are silent about Hong Kong. We have allowed China to force us to drop longstanding support for Tibetan independence, and to stop holding high-level meetings with the Dalai Lama.

During President-for-life Xi Jinping’s state visit to Britain, itself an elaborate kowtow to Peking, our police also treated pro-Tibetan protesters with astonishing harshness.

It is so much easier to screech about Russia, than to face or challenge a genuinely menacing superpower.

***

I asked the BBC how they could justify using propaganda footage, allegedly from the Syrian town of Ghouta, on a major news bulletin without any indication that it came from a partial source. They admitted they had done this. They admitted that it was against their rules. But I did not get the impression they were all that bothered, and I would not be surprised to see such stuff again. The BBC ‘reports’ an awful lot of things from Syria which it has no way of checking, from supposed gas attacks by the Assad state to death tolls and films (generally of wounded children being rushed about the place by unarmed young men). It has completely abandoned any semblance of independence or impartiality. How then can it justify its licence fee, collected on these conditions?

***

Theresa May complains that the EU is threatening British sovereignty over Northern Ireland. But the Blair government, backed by the Tories, gave that sovereignty away in its 1998 surrender to Gerry Adams and his friend Bill Clinton. I’m amazed at how few people have read the so-called ‘Good Friday Agreement’. Are they afraid of what they’ll find?

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Mr Conradi is a former Moscow correspondent and an experienced journalist, now Foreign Editor of the Sunday Times, and it shows.

His book is far more interesting and original than the wearisome one-note Putin denunciations and ‘New Cold War’ material which clogs up the small space allocated to Russia on the shelves of our bookshops.

He understands that Russians are people like us, and that Russia is a nation with interests. Having lived in Moscow, he does not suffer from the common Western horror of a place which most people imagine to be permanently chest-deep in snow, peopled with drunks and bears, constantly resounding to the rumble of military parades, and cut off from us by a funny alphabet.

Yes, this is a caricature of western views of Russia, but it is not far off, just as the famous ‘New Yorker’ front cover, showing the world as seen (or rather not seen) from Manhattan, is a caricature and also true.

Interestingly the title of his book considers the possibility that , handled differently Russia could now be a very different country from the one we behold, and also that our relations with it could be much better.

I think this is true. And it is not just true in the sense I explored earlier, when the great George Kennan’s wise advice was ignored for the crudest and cheapest reasons, and we created a new enmity out of nothing by ignoring history and listening to greedy lobbies.

I almost wept in the early 1990s when I saw the clouds of businessmen and economists descending on the old USSR, touting the supposed cleansing virtues of free markets. If I *knew* one thing about this huge, tragic, desolate, broken place, it was that this was absolutely the wrong medicine for its sickness.

More than 70 years of Bolshevism had left a country crippled by corruption, automatic dishonesty, the suppression of truth as a matter of policy, arbitrary authority and the madness of dogma. And yet here was a people of great fortitude, talented and well-educated, anxious to be free in spirit.

I think, looking back now, that what Russia needed above all was help in establishing the Rule of Law over Power, and to do that I cannot think of anything worse than a decade of bandit capitalism. I also think it was so broken that something akin to the Marshall Aid given to Europe in the 1940s, or the huge spending poured into East Germany in the 1990s, was both necessary and desirable. There would have been a foreign policy price, no doubt (there always is) and an economic independence price (there always is) but I think Russia at that stage would have been prepared to pay.

People who went only to Moscow or Leningrad where a semblance of modern life could be found in the most expensive hotels, had no idea of the state of the country beyond these islands of comparative prosperity and modernity.

Also they were clueless about how vastly corrupt Soviet society had been, inevitable in a system where so many people held arbitrary, unaccountable power and there was neither a free press nor independent courts and police.

I waltzed off to the USA just as things began to get really complicated. I’d been there for the fall of Soviet power, as my editor had intended and I had hoped, and interest naturally waned afterwards. Anyway, I’d crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and made my way South and East to the District of Columbia, a stately place of marble temples amid woodland and low hills, from which dirty, rackety old Moscow seemed very far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface, as George Orwell once described something else. In the course of trying to understand the USA, which Englishmen wrongly think is easy but which certainly isn’t, I paid less attention to Russia.

I was briefly jolted back into interest by Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of his own Parliament (accompanied by the shooting of unarmed demonstrators near the TV centre in Ostankino, in the north of the city, near the homes of some friends of mine) in the autumn of 1993. I recall with shame that I took the dismissive view that Yeltsin was so vital to the rescue of Russia that this sort of behaviour was excusable.

Like many people who cared about Russia, I had grown weary of Mikhail Gorbachev, especially after what seemed to me to be his violent and stu0pid intervention in Lithuania in January 1991, which I witnessed. I was unimpressed by his faltering performance in the months before the August 1991 putsch, and his bumbling weakness after it. And I became a lazy admirer of Boris Yeltsin, whose star quality fuddled my wits. Simply to stand near him had been thrilling (by contrast I was once canvassed for my vote by Mikhail Gorbachev, in what were then the Lenin Hills, a rather fancy district of Moscow. I had become so pasty, drab and Sovietised that he mistook me for a citizen and asked for my support for his doomed Union Treaty. It was not thrilling at all). I now view Gorbachev as a wronged man.

I knew Yeltsin drank too much. I decided to think it was amusing. I knew he was corrupt. I decided not to care. I knew, in the back of my mind, that his years as a Communist apparatchik - including his implementation (as Party boss of the closed city of Sverdlovsk) of the creepy decision to flatten the notorious house ‘of special purpose’ where the Tsar and his family had been murdered by the Bolsheviks - had been at best variable. But I decided to pretend it didn’t matter.

So I can hardly criticise Bill Clinton for his rather similar attitude to ‘Good Ol’ Boris’, very well described by Conradi. It was during this period that ‘the West’ got away with the break-up of the USSR, because Russia was then so poor and so weak that, though Moscow loathed the partitioning of its former territory, it simply lacked the power to resist. Of course, this was a pity in a way, much as the Versailles settlement was. Minefields were laid which were bound to go off in the future. Things which seemed easy in 1992 would come to very difficult , in their consequences, 20 years later. If Russia, for instance, had been strong enough in 1992 to insist on keeping control of Crimea and parts of the Eastern Ukraine, much later bloodshed and tension might have been avoided. The pity is that nobody in ‘The ‘West’ had the wit to foresee this.

The Russians were obviously bruised by what happened. Equally obviously, they would not remain prostrate forever. Conradi is very good on this period, boozy Yeltsin (trying to hail a cab, trouserless, near the White House, allegedly in search of pizza) and his savage Chechen war, the reunification of Germany ( secretly but vehemently opposed by Margaret Thatcher, who suddenly understood what the end of the Cold War *really* meant for Britain (principally that Germany, and the EU it dominates, was henceforth by far the USA’s most important client and ally in Europe) , and recoiled at the discovery.

Maybe this yearning for the artificial continuation of the cosy, endless Finest Hour and the supposed Anglo-American friendship by other means lies behind the popularity of the ‘New Cold War’ in Britain, otherwise inexplicable.

Returning briefly to this topic, and NATO expansion, Conradi notes that Russian (as distinct from Western opposition, discussed elsewhere) opposition to NATO expansion did not just come from leathery old hardliners in Moscow. One of its most articulate opponents was Boris Nemtsov who prophetically warned that it would unite old Communists and other enemies of democracy. Nemtsov, as many readers will recall was mysteriously murdered in the heart of Moscow in February 2015, a killing widely attributed to the Putin state at the time because of Nemtsov’s longstanding liberalism and opposition to Putin (I myself cannot think what purpose such a murder would have served for Putin, if he is rational, Nemtsov by then being no conceivable threat to Putin, but there).

Conradi also has what must the definitive examination of the old argument about what the West promised Russia (about NATO) at the end of the Cold War. Nothing was put in writing, and nobody in Moscow really expected NATO expansion eastwards to take place, so nothing was asked for in writing. And it would probably have been refused if it had been. But verbal assurances were plentiful. Conradi quotes this interesting article by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, the best ambassador Britain ever sent to Moscow, http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_nato_enlargement_assurances_and_misunderstandings, for instance ‘When Soviet Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov, asked the British prime minister in March 1991 about NATO’s plans in the region, John Major replied that he “did not himself foresee circumstances now or in the future where East European countries would become members of NATO”. Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, told Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh on 26 March 1991 that “there are no plans in NATO to include the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in NATO in one form or another”.’

Look, I could go on, about rigged elections, Chechnya, the Georgian conflict, about Vladimir Putin’s astonishing Munich speech of 2007. I can’t claim to agree with his view on all these matters, but that’s not the point. This is a serious book by a serious person, written with knowledge and responsibility. Here’s an example. When he comes to the great Ukraine crisis of 2014, I think some of the more naïve enthusiasts for the Kiev Revolution might be shocked to find a far from pro-Putin commentator such as Mr Conradi noting ‘the pro-democracy groups also received considerable financial help from the West’ and ‘for all his faults, Yanukovych was the democratically-elected president of Ukraine and attempts to unseat him were undemocratic’., and ‘the EU must bear its share of the blame for pushing Ukraine into a position where it had to choose between Europe and Russia’.

Frankly, any truly clear-eyed observer could have reached these conclusions. The interesting thing is that Peter Conradi did, and has the courage to say so against the fashion which still clothes the February 2014 events in a golden glow of unmixed joy and wonder. This is just one example, and I could give dozens, of why this is such a good book and why you should read it, if you are remotely interested in this important if not vital subject.

**Who lost Russia: How the World entered a New Cold War. Peter Conradi, Oneworld Publications, London 2017***

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08 January 2017 1:42 AM

Last week we learned that ambulance-chasing ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers are sucking £440 million out of the NHS every year. That’s just their share of the loot. Lawsuits in total cost the Health Service more than £1.5 billion a year. Any visitor to NHS hospitals knows that these cynical firms are allowed to advertise their ‘services’ in the public areas of hospitals themselves. In effect, the NHS has to help people to ruin it. There is no need for any of this. It all stems from a crazy mistake made back in the 1990s by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Almost everyone who understood the subject was against introducing no win, no fee lawsuits at the time, including senior judges and distinguished lawyers.They warned that it would ‘Americanise’ our legal system. And they were dead right. I can remember, as long ago as 1982, watching Paul Newman playing a deadbeat US lawyer in The Verdict. The opening scene showed Newman hanging round funeral parlours, wretchedly handing his business card to the mourners of accident victims, in the hope of getting a case, any case.At the time, I had no idea this went on. Later, during many visits to the US and while living there in the early 1990s, I discovered the hideous truth. Nobody, anywhere, was safe from a mad lawsuit which might well succeed. I was warned, for instance, that if a guest in my house merely spilled hot water on himself, I could well face a gigantic lawsuit and lose it. From this came the cringing, hyper-cautious ‘health and safety’ culture which dogs the supposed land of the free (and now dogs us too). Not to mention much higher costs for almost everything, as insurers raise their premiums to finance the incessant, huge payments. Who, knowing this, would introduce this Bloodsuckers’ Charter in a country that didn’t have it? We did. A Royal commission had opposed it. The Law Commission didn’t like it.It was excoriated by experts and laymen alike in the House of Lords, where it was attacked by the late Lord Rawlinson for introducing ‘ambulance-chasing’ in which lawyers acted ‘like vultures’.But Mrs Thatcher went gaily ahead with this Bloodsuckers’ Charter, more politely known as the 1990 Courts And Legal Services Act (Section 58). This cleared the way for the change, but was fitted with a time-delay device – perhaps because the Government was ashamed of it and didn’t want to be linked with it when it eventually took effect. IT was finally activated in 1995 by the passage of the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. In a last-ditch attempt to stop it, which failed by only six votes, the late Lord Ackner warned ‘there will be occasions when this country will exceed the worst excesses of the United States’. He noted that the original Bill had been ‘enacted in the teeth of opposition from seven Law Lords, the Master of the Rolls, a former Lord Chancellor, my noble and learned friend Lord Hailsham, a former Attorney-General, the noble and learned lord, Lord Rawlinson of Ewell and the Law Commission’.The clear reason for the measure was to save money on legal aid, which is of course a very costly way of trying to see that justice is open to those who are not rich. But, as we now see, it was a false economy. The NHS’s annual legal bill of £1.5 billion is only slightly less than the £1.7 billion which legal aid cost the whole country in 2014-15.And that is just the NHS. Who can count the extra costs loaded on to every other public body, from schools to the Army, and on to every private company, by the need to guard against opportunist lawyers scouring the country for plaintiffs seeking a payout?In the catalogue of mistakes made by governments, this is a pretty big one. But it is also quite easy to put right. Who would weep, apart from the legal vultures, if we abolished no win, no fee and went back to legal aid for reasonable cases? It would obviously cost less in the long run. My guess is that nothing happens because most people still blame the loopy ‘Health and Safety’ culture, wrongly, on human rights laws or political correctness. It has nothing to do with them. It can’t even be blamed on Anthony Blair, who was indeed a disaster but didn’t wreck the country all by himself. It was just a stupid mistake. Theresa May has the sense to reverse it, and should do so.

How YOU can help save a vital freedom...Journalists and newspapers aren’t always very nice. I have been on the receiving end of my trade’s less lovable features, during a (long-ago) family tragedy, and so I know this better than most reporters.That’s why I’m not inclined to be pious about press freedom. We scribblers are never going to end up commemorated in stained-glass windows. Like many important parts of a free society, our liberty is a two-edged sword. But you’ll miss it once it is gone. There is, literally, nobody else with the power to take on big government and big corporations. They talk to us (and try ceaselessly to bamboozle and cajole us) because they are afraid of us. And if they weren’t, they would be greedier, more incompetent, lazier, and more crooked than they are.Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the USA, a man who understood the cynicism and untrustworthiness of politicians very well, because he was a politician, put it best. ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’Now, lesser men and women are quietly building a coffin for press freedom in this country. Some of them have had their own nasty actions exposed by newspapers. Others just don’t like seeing opinions they don’t share given a powerful platform. There is still time to stop them, but it is very short. Thanks to a foolish law passed by David Cameron, the Culture Secretary, Karen Bradley, can by a stroke of her pen bring back that ancient wrong, state regulation of newspapers, under the threat of bankruptcy for those who don’t comply. Please write to her, as soon as you can, urging her not to do so – or use the coupon on Page 44.

They’ve taken a bite out of MarsTHERE’S a technique for raising prices without drawing attention to it, known in the food trade as ‘shrinking the chocolate bar’. The bar gets smaller. The price stays the same. The poor consumer quite possibly doesn’t notice. This has all got much easier since the state-sponsored attack on customary British weights and measures, our old landmarks and signposts. Who knows what a gram is, or feels like? But I know the feel of four ounces of toffees in the palm of my hand, just as I know what it means when someone measures five feet nine inches tall, but have to look it up when he says he is 1.7526 metres. Now that fine body the British Weights and Measures Association (BWMA) has spotted a very odd change in the Mars Bar, once two ounces (or 58 grams). In 2014 that went down to 51 grams. Only the keen-eyed would have noticed that this was even a change. The BWMA cheekily wrote to Mars asking why they couldn’t put the weight of their bars in ounces as well as grams on the wrapper. The company said (incorrectly) that the figure in grams was more accurate. Now it turns out that Mars Bars made in metric Holland do give the weight in ounces and grams, clearly showing that the weight has been reduced to 1.80oz. I wonder why they can’t do that on the bars they make in Britain, where so many of us still think in English measures?

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21 August 2016 2:07 AM

Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world. Its economy is rocky, its cities grubby and run-down. Its education system isn’t much good.So this country spends huge sums of scarce money and great effort to find young men and women who can win medals in international sporting competitions. It carefully chooses sports where the competition is weak. It relentlessly drives the chosen athletes. And it works. At home and abroad, its image is transformed. Its national media go into hysterics over each medal. The people at home forget for a moment the dreariness of their lives. The anthem plays and the flag flies high. The country I am thinking of is East Germany, the self-styled ‘German Democratic Republic’. You may remember the superb figure skater Katarina Witt, who won Winter Olympic gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and a pile of other awards for her ghastly country in the years just before it collapsed in a cloud of rust.What did her triumphs prove? Nothing much, except that state power can achieve sporting success. In which case, what is so joyous about it? If sport is about anything, surely it is about individual achievement, not plans, budgets and political prestige.What could be further from the burning individual talents and grit celebrated in Chariots Of Fire than some Ministry of Sport fulfilling its medal plan?But what, deep down, is the difference between this episode and Sir John Major’s dash for Olympic gold which has now paid off in Brazil? In fact, I think our state-sponsored medal programme may be worse in some ways than East Berlin’s because, as a free society, we had the power to question it and we didn’t.It might also be worth recalling that Sir John’s much-praised initiative was financed mainly by the Lottery – in which a British government for the first time actively encouraged gambling, especially among the vulnerable poor, the main payers of this tax on false hope. Indeed, Sir John’s legacy of gambling and debt, forced on students in the universities he so wildly expanded, may be his main memorial. You may say, quite rightly, that I am jaundiced because I couldn’t care less about sport. My sympathies in Rio lie mainly with the empty, wet seats, which beautifully sum up my view of the Olympics. But even if I were an enthusiast for Underwater Motorcycling, Bovine Ballet or Synchronised Sunburn, or whatever it is we currently lead the world in, I’d still have the same misgivings. This is what failed and powerless countries do to make themselves feel better. It is an illusion, and when it ends, things will be worse than they were before.

Tragic Victims of our deal with the devil

Who can fail to be moved and grieved by the sight of a small child in distress? But please do not let your emotions stop you thinking.The picture of the shocked Aleppo survivor, Omran Daqneesh, like that of the drowned child Alan Kurdi last year, should not be allowed to enforce a conformist opinion on the world. The death of Alan Kurdi did not mean that it was wise to fling wide the borders of Europe (as Germany’s Angela Merkel now well knows). The rescue of Omran Daqneesh should not make us side with the bloody and merciless Syrian rebels. Why is Aleppo a war zone in the first place? Do you know? I will tell you. Syria was a peaceful country until it was deliberately destabilised by Saudi Arabia and its fanatical, sectarian Gulf allies, consumed with hatred for the Assad government and, above all, its ally Iran. Worse, this monstrous intervention was supported by the USA, Britain and France, all sucking up to the Saudis for oil, money and arms contracts. In the hope of bringing down Assad, we made a devil’s bargain with some of the worst fanatics in the Middle East, people who make Anjem Choudary look like the Vicar of Dibley.We know of Britain’s role for certain because of the very strange case of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man accused by British authorities of attending a terror training camp in Syria. His trial collapsed in June 2015 because his defence lawyers argued that the terror groups he was accused of supporting had been helped by British intelligence.The Assad state, as you might expect, defended itself against its attackers, helped in the end by Iran and Russia.And the war which followed was the ruin of Syria, whose innocent people found their peaceful cities and landscape turned into a screaming battlefield, as it still is. If you are truly grieved by the picture of poor little Omran, just be careful who you blame.

Anjem Choudary, broadcasting’s favourite Islamist loudmouth, was and is a vain, bloviating, blowhard fraud, another boozy drug-taking low-life posing as a serious person. He found a role and fools to indulge him, many in the same media who now queue up to rejoice at his imprisonment.But I do not feel safer from terror now that he is locked up. Worse, I feel less safe from Chairman May’s sour-faced surveillance state, which takes a dim and narrow view of free speech and liberty. Choudary has been locked up not for what he did but for what he said. Claims he influenced anyone into crime are thin. Even the sneaky wording of the Terrorism Act, in which he was charged with ‘inviting’ support for IS, is suspicious.It sounds like ‘inciting’, and is meant to, for incitement to terror and murder is a real crime, even in free countries. But it isn’t the same as ‘inviting’, a much weaker word. You may gloat that Choudary is eating Islamic porridge. But be careful what you gloat over. A law as loose as this could easily be used against anyone the state doesn’t like. I predict that it will be, too.By the way, I spent several hours last week circling Government offices trying to find out how many such charges there have been – the CPS sent me to the Justice Ministry, they told me to call the Home Office, who sent me back to the CPS. This pathetic pass-the-parcel evasion suggests they don’t care much. This stuff is propaganda, not genuine security.

******

A few days ago I took part in a recorded BBC debate on prisons, What Point Prison?, which will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesday

There was a startling exchange on capital punishment between me and Erwin James, a penitent convicted murderer much admired by liberals, who has now become a distinguished writer on prisons. You may be surprised at what he said.

If the predicted event takes place, all the appalling old waxworks of liberal elite Britain, all those to blame for the mess in which we now find ourselves, collectively responsible for disastrous wars in places where we had no business to be, a creepy surrender to criminal gangsters on our own sovereign territory, the accelerating break-up of the United Kingdom, breath-taking economic incompetence, needlessly surrendered sovereignty, spectacular educational failure, a combined assault on private and family life unprecedented outside the USSR, and a frightening decline in law and justice, assembled in one place, all urging the same mistaken course of action...

Here we have it, the modern world in arms, or at least in each other’s arms.

And here, in the Financial Times , we have from Mr Janan Ganesh the underlying explanation of such an event – the elite ranged together to oppose the people. Mr Ganash has spotted the real division in our society today, as opposed to the artificial boundary which cruelly divides Blairites from joining with each other in a single assembly of enthusiastic Tonyites.

Apart from asking ‘Why did it take them so long to spot it?’ I am grateful to the Blairite of Blairites, John Rentoul, for drawing my attention to it:

‘If there is a lesson from recent weeks, it is that mild Conservatives and moderate adherents to the Labour cause share more with each other than with the rest of their own parties. On Europe, but also migration and globalisation, they want to amend the status quo not break it. In their tone is an absence of anger that my trade habitually elides with a lack of passion.

Against them in this referendum is a party in all but name and formal incorporation, drawn from the Tory right and the Labour left and incubated in the Leave campaign. These politicians are conservative and anti-establishment at the same time.’

Which, without the sympathetic description of the New Labour/Cameroon alliance as ‘mild’ or ‘moderate’( which their actions certainly are not, given their devastating effects on this country and the Middle East over the past few decades), is much what I have been saying for many years now.

He asks :

‘…take Ms Rudd and Mr Umunna, or George Osborne, chancellor, and his former adversary Ed Balls, or even David Cameron and any of 100 Labour MPs: do they disagree over the size of the state more than they agree over Britain’s place in the EU, its future as an open economy, its indispensability as the liberal thumb on the continental scales? And which of the two sets of issues is now the real stuff of politics?’

And he urges them to get together, thus :

‘Under the blur of digits, these politicians have the same basic orientation. Scorn it as the Davos consensus but it has done more for British prosperity and self-respect than the admixture of socialism and Tory paternalism ever could — or, to judge by the 1970s, ever did. If this settlement is menaced by forces that will outlast this referendum, it is myopic of its guardians to remain separate out of fealty to a party system that was forged in the industrial age for an empire nation.’

Predicting a ‘different arrangement of forces’ which may not be neat (he’s right), he notes: ‘But at least elections between a Christian Democrat-style party and a Liberal-ish party would correspond to the arguments we are having today. Millions of Eurosceptic Labour voters would have a team, and so would those of us who want more not less of the world as it is. I hear the Tory and Labour moderates newly mingling in the Remain offices rather get on. As a glint of the future, it will have to do.’

It just makes me wonder what that other Blairite, Michael Gove, is doing in the 'Leave' campaign, a development that has always puzzled me and continues to do so.

20 December 2015 1:16 AM

It is now quite plain that David Cameron neither expected nor wanted to win an overall majority at the General Election. He promised the EU referendum in the belief and hope that he would never have to redeem his pledge.

He has no idea what to do. The concessions he claims he will win aren’t available, and he wouldn’t want them if he could get them, as he’s rather keen on having the country run by foreigners.

Remember the wild haste with which he rushed us back into the European Arrest Warrant, a gross interference with our laws and freedom?

I bet he gulped, rather than whooped, when news was brought to him that he was going to have a majority big enough to allow (or rather force) him to do as he had said he would. He’s still hoping nobody has read the wild Election manifesto he issued, when he was sublimely confident that he would be heading another coalition.

His never-ending journey round European capitals, in search of an unattainable deal, is the most desperate quest since The Lord Of The Rings.

And he is not going to be rescued by any wizards, elves, walking forests, giant eagles or ghost armies.

Only one thing will save him, the ghastly flitting grey shapes of the politically undead, John Major, Michael Heseltine and the rest of the Europhile Black Riders, screeching and wailing (quite untruly) that Britain cannot survive outside the EU.

As long as he can persuade the Blair creature to stay silent, such a campaign of fear may just work. Millions of British people have never lived in an independent country and are scared of trying to do so, like infants who have never ridden a bicycle without stabilisers.

And when they are not scared, they are bored by the subject, or put off it by the blazer-and-cravat bangers-on, who can speak of nothing else.

It’s a pity really, that it should come to this, that a country created by repeated episodes of dangerous valour and solitary endeavour should come to an end because its voters are frightened of letting go of Nurse Angela Merkel, or think they can’t manage on their own in the world without Jean-Claude Juncker to wipe their noses for them. But, after the failure of Mr Cameron’s latest scrabble for unavailable concessions, I suspect that’s the way it will go.

Fear conquers all.

You'll envy these lesbians - for their cheap flats

I have now seen my first Hollywood Lesbian Romance, the much-hyped Carol starring Cate Blanchett with co-star Rooney Mara and have to tell you that it was extraordinarily dull.

Spoiler warning here, but the solitary gun doesn’t even go off, which about sums up the action. By contrast, the careful re-creation of early 1950s New York, just before Christmas, was wonderful.

The most astonishing thing was that a young person on a small wage was still able, in those times, to afford a chilly but perfectly habitable flat in the centre of a big city while he or she started out on a career.

This aspect of life is more far-fetched now to us than lesbian marriage would have seemed to the New Yorkers of 1952.

Secrets are safe with Charles

Why is anyone shocked that the heir to the throne, who will one day be head of state, is allowed to see Cabinet papers? I’m more shocked by the idea that quite a few senior modern politicians, unrepentant communist hacks, fantasists, drunkards, tax-dodgers, etc, have had such access.

If ever I have a moment’s doubt about the Monarchy, it is dispelled when I look at those who hate it. Why do they loathe it so? It has no power as such.

But, like the king on a chessboard, it prevents others from occupying the space where it stands.

Politicians long to be the ones being cheered, they long to have mounted guards of honour and anthems played when they enter the room. They want their own aeroplanes. They want the Armed Forces to be their personal toys. They dream of requiring us to be loyal to them.

It creeps up on them. Cherie Blair (having failed to get elected as an MP) once acted as hostess aboard the Royal Train, and her husband loved posing with soldiers. Lady Thatcher started turning up at the scenes of national disasters.

David Cameron claimed to be speaking ‘on behalf of everyone in Britain’ when he wished astronaut Tim Peake luck on Tuesday. No he wasn’t.

He’s a divisive politician and he doesn’t speak on my behalf (or on the behalves of quite a few others) about anything. It was the Queen’s job, and she duly did it.

One day, God willing, Charles should do it. Reading the papers that reveal the miserable deals and compromises of government should help him keep his poise when he grants audiences to the trivial, unmemorable men and women who secretly think they’re more important than the Crown of England.

Mother of all bias

The current Radio Times, previewing a documentary on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV (BBC4, 9pm Monday), refers to ‘the inherent wrongness of Watch With Mother’. The writer doesn’t feel any need to explain what was ‘inherently wrong’ with this innocent programme. Given the magazine’s BBC origins, we can guess. The Corporation’s ‘Producers’ Guidelines’ used to say that categorising women as housewives was like categorising black people as criminals. So you can imagine what they think of the idea that mothers might actually stay at home to raise their own children. It doesn’t cross such minds that anyone might disagree.

The French Tory party and the French Labour party have just publicly combined to defeat the National Front, which has nasty leaders and a nasty past, but which many mistreated Frenchmen and Frenchwomen have turned to in despair at their existing elite.

This cynical alliance just confirms that these parties are two faces of the same worthless coin. Doesn’t it make you pleased that, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, this country now once again has two parties which actually disagree on major issues? Sinister movements flourish when real politics dies. Yet the Blairites in politics and the media continue to spit rage at Mr Corbyn simply for existing. Even his Christmas card is analysed for signs of Marxism.

Do grow up. In an adult country, it is possible for people to disagree, and for all to recognise that nobody (especially George Osborne) is right all the time.

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05 October 2014 12:46 AM

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday columnHow odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.

Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.

Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.

One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?

It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.

The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.

Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.

You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.

There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.

What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.

I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.

But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve.

His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.

I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.

IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.

Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.

The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.

Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.

No happy ending for story time

How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.

For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.

We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories.

It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.

And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?

A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.

But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.

My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.

This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.

My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?

By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.

Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.

The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.

If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.

It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.

Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.

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02 December 2013 2:56 PM

Having spent a lot of the 1990s abroad in various places, I missed much of the Major era, the forerunner of the Cameron age. So I occasionally do a bit of digging in the files to improve my understanding of this fascinating time, and its continued influence on British politics.

Today’s episode is stimulated by the presence of Lord Chadlington, formerly Peter Gummer, in the Prime Minister’s entourage on his visit to Peking and other parts of Zhongguo. It is quite well-known that Lord Chadlington is a close neighbour of the Camerons in an idyllic hilltop hamlet in Oxfordshire. But I have long thought it an interesting reflection on British political journalism that so little was written about this obviously very important man. Here are a few notes from the library.

Peter Gummer, as he once was, was for many years in charge of Shandwick PR, ‘the world’s largest PR company’. He is now boss of Huntsworth PR, is the brother of the more famous John Selwyn Gummer (now Lord Deben). The Times, reporting on the Tory search for help in its 1992 election campaign, in 1991, said that Chris Patten, then Tory chairman, had asked Peter Gummer to draw up a shortlist of possible advertising agencies. The Times also reported that Peter Gummer had advised the Foreign Office on media relations during the (first, successful) Gulf War.

In the same year the Mail on Sunday’s ‘Black Dog’ insider column said ‘I am watching with interest the PR activities of Peter Gummer, younger brother of Agriculture Minister John and boss of Shandwick Communications. After giving his advice to the Foreign Office during the Gulf War, Mr Gummer was also involved in advising the Ministry of Defence and the Arts Council.

Now the enterprising Mr Gummer has turned his gaze on the Department of Health and I hear that his excellent connections have even won him an entree to 10 Downing Street and a tour of the place conducted by the Prime Minister himself.’

The Times, reporting on an apparent smoothing of John Major’s image in late 1991, said ‘But most attention is being focused on Peter Gummer, head of Shandwick Public Relations and the brother of the agriculture minister, who has quickly become part of the Downing Street inner circle. ``Peter is in and out a lot working on the presentational skills of many cabinet members,'' says one who admits to having benefitted from his attentions. ``I cannot believe he has not also given the prime minister the benefit of his advice.''’

In the same month, the London Evening Standard ran a joint profile of Selwyn and Peter Gummer, under the headline ‘The Blue Brothers’. Both men, it seems, originally wanted to go into the Church. Their father, a Welsh miner who himself became a priest, is said to have sold collections of his sermons to pay his sons’ school fees. Later, Peter Gummer ‘wanted to be rich’. He thought it would be ‘wonderful’. At the time of this encounter, he had recently handled the PR for McDonald’s in Moscow (What a job that must have been . Few will now believe what an extraordinary and fascinating moment it was when the incarnation of global consumer capitalism opened its first outlet in what was still a Communist capital). He was said to be worth £12.5 million. Interestingly, Peter Gummer was a newspaper reporter on the Isle of Wight before switching to PR, a useful training which many people in public life would have benefited from.

The Daily Mail called him ‘John Major’s favourite PR man’ in 1992, soon before the election of that year. He had some business troubles ( and overcame them), and was talked of as a possible chairman of the Arts Council ( and did become chairman of the Council’s lottery Advisory Panel). He won a contract to promote Cambodia as a tourist destination in 1994, became Chairman of the Royal Opera House in 1996 and was also involved in advising to Tories on how to combat New Labour in 1996, just before getting his peerage in August of that year at the age of 53. Lord (Maurice) Saatchi was in the same list. There was a bit of a fuss about this. Left-wing papers got cross. In a rather chilly leading article, even the Daily Telegraph asked if he would have enough time to devote to parliamentary work. Others said that Peter Gummer was jointly responsible for the notorious ‘demon eyes’ campaign showing a demonic Mr Blair above the slogan ‘New Labour – New Danger’, which in my view wouldn’t have been a bad slogan at all, if anybody could have worked out at the time exactly what the danger was.

An amusing footnote was provided by the late, great Alan Watkins, one of the most astute and observant political writers of the age, who said in the Independent on Sunday that Peter Gummer had once told him he was in fact a Labour supporter.

By 1998, Lord Chadlingtn and the other veterans of Tory PR had been told by the new post-Major leadership of William Hague that their services were not required. By 2003 he was said to be in an ‘advisory group’ helping Iain Duncan Smith, a hopeless if chivalrous task. Edward Bernays himself, the founder of the science of PR, could not have saved IDS from his own party. I am not sure if Lord Chadlington was active during Michael Howard’s leadership. Given Mr Howard’s great helpfulness towards David Cameron, it’s not impossible that the two co-operated. But I can find no mention of it.

In 2005, he was musing helpfully about David Cameron’s selection as Tory candidate at Witney (which he attended as President of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association): "He was the only candidate out of 20 who delivered his speech off by heart in front of the lectern,'' he says. "My guess is he is very self-analytical and hard on himself - he always wants to do better.''. "David and Samantha were good-looking, they had lots of friends and fantastic careers''.

In September 2005, he was one of five senior city figures who write to the Financial Times to say: ‘Sir, Britain needs the Conservative party to get back on its feet, rediscover a sense of mission and then get out there and put right the problems that the current Labour government has created. Voters will back a Conservative ticket only when they really believe that the party is bold, in it for the long term and has a leader who they believe has got the courage to take the hard decisions and inject the energy needed to get things done. When it comes to choosing their next leader, Conservatives must think about the future. The country cannot afford them to drift. We have listened to all the potential candidates but one stands out above all the rest. David Cameron has conviction and a sense of direction coupled with the energy and dynamism to get things done. We believe he would make an excellent prime minister. Roddie Fleming Sir Tom Cowie Lord Harris Michael Green Lord Chadlington’ (He was by now Chief Executive of a new PR firm, Huntsworth).

A few weeks afterwards, afterwards, he did it again, writing to the FT with a different group of colleagues : ‘Sir, The Conservative party needs a leader who can deliver economic stability and carry out the necessary reforms to make our economy more competitive. It is our view that David Cameron is the candidate most likely to deliver the dynamic economy on which all else depends. He shows an impressive grasp of the factors that contribute to a strong economy - namely competitive tax rates and good public infrastructure in areas such as transport and education. He is the only candidate to have gone beyond simplistic platitudes when it comes to deregulation - recognising that to cut regulation we need first to tackle this country's risk-averse culture. And he has been prepared to face up to tough decisions on long-term problems such as pensions, university finance and road-building. We sincerely hope that the Conservative party has the foresight to elect Mr Cameron as its next leader. Simon Wolfson, Chief Executive, Next; Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, Former Chairman, J. Sainsbury; Lord Kirkham, Former Conservative Party Treasurer; Lord Harris of Peckham, Founder and Chairman, Carpetright; Michael Spencer, Chief Executive, ICAP; Sir Jack Harvie, Conservative Fundraiser and Donor; Jonathan Green, Founder, GLG; Lord Chadlington, Chairman, Huntsworth .’

The Sunday Times recorded in April 2007 that ‘Cameron's neighbour Lord Chadlington, brother of John Selwyn Gummer, owns the magnificent Queen Anne manor in this Oxfordshire village, and also its little farm and the pool in which the Camerons are invited to swim.’

In January 2009, the Times wrote that Lord Chadlington had ‘bankrolled Mr Cameron’s leadership bid’. The Independent On Sunday reported in July 2011 that ‘When Cameron came to the [Witney]area 10 years ago, he rented a cottage from Lord Chadlington, the brother of John Gummer, before buying a farmhouse in the hamlet of Dean when he won the seat of Witney.’

In May 2012, Mr Cameron famously dressed down, in an ordinary suit rather than spongebag trousers, while attending the wedding of Naomi Gummer, Lord Chadlington’s daughter. More recently, a Chinese PR company bought a large stake in Huntsworth, which perhaps brings us back to where we started, on the plane to Zhongguo.

The thing that interests me about this relationship is that it tells us about a side of Mr Cameron the political reporters seldom trouble with – his past as a professional PR man, his strong links, through business and personal connections, with a part of Britain which is personally prosperous but not especially socially or morally conservative. I suspect that its members, thanks to their backgrounds and educations, generally regard themselves as naturally patriotic in a sort of ‘God save the Queen’ way, and are puzzled by any suggestion that their adherence to the EU might call that into question.

I have no idea, by the way, what Lord Chadlington’s detailed politics are (though I am amused by Alan Watkins’s mischievous suggestion that he is or was a Labour supporter). We know, of course, that his brother John Gummer is on the Heathite wing of the Tory Party, especially on EU issues. But people at this level of professional politics often do not have much interest in policies as such, or in the struggle between competing ideas. Office for people like them is what they want.

It also, in my view, shows that the Major version of the Tory Party, a largely depoliticised machine for winning office, survived the Hague and IDS era and has now reasserted itself. But how times have changed since 1997. Now they can only hope to keep the Tories in being. Presumably ready for the new era of proportional representation which the Lib-Lab Coalition of 2015-2020 is likely to bring in.

17 November 2013 12:13 AM

This is the season to be soppy about servicemen and women. We buy and wear our poppies, and go on about ‘heroes’, a word which embarrasses soldiers quite a lot.

This is typical of our national doublethink about fighting men. The more we gush about how wonderful they are, the less we spend on the Forces and the less we understand what they do.

And the more we treat them as sentimental figures in stained-glass windows, the more we recoil from the unpleasant reality.

As we prepare to shove a Royal Marine sergeant into jail for killing a wounded enemy, we piously intone ‘we will remember them’ at war memorials.

As we do so, do we really think that the wars of 1914 and 1939 were chivalrous affairs, fought by schoolboys, in which we did no wrong? Does anyone really think we never shot prisoners?

We certainly let them die. I still possess somewhere a card signed by the pitifully few survivors of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst (36 out of a ship’s company of 1,968). Shouldn’t there have been more? My father’s ship, the cruiser Jamaica, had been sent in, with HMS Belfast, to finish off the burning, crippled Scharnhorst with torpedoes on Boxing Day 1943.

He was quite pleased to have been there, but got a bit gruff about the last bit. They had left quite a few German seamen to die horribly in the freezing water and the poisonous fuel oil, and they could be heard calling out for help.

This is a terrible breach of the laws of the sea. But much like Marine ‘A’, most of the British bluejackets present would have muttered, as they steamed away from the screams, that Hitler’s navy would have done the same for them, if things were the other way round. Like Marine ‘A’, they would have been right. The official reason for this was justifiable fear of German U-Boats.

But I suspect that the Russian convoys, an especially merciless theatre of war, had hardened hearts on both sides. In war, good men are ordered by their superiors to do bad things, the opposite of what they would do in peacetime.

They obey because they can see the sense in it. It has always been so. In which case, their superiors had better know that their purpose is justified. They had better win the war, so that the other side doesn’t drag them before a war crimes tribunal. And, in all justice, they should not ask too many questions afterwards.

If our criminal justice system ruthlessly pursued every crime ever committed, then the prosecution of Marine ‘A’ in Afghanistan would be justified and necessary. But we do no such thing. Millions of crimes, some very severe, go unpunished, often for political reasons.

Worse, we now have a political class which likes to go to war solely to make itself look good. Our current Prime Minister so enjoyed his vanity war in Libya that he yearned for another one in Syria.

He models his life and work on Anthony Blair, who knew (if it is possible) even less about the world than David Cameron. This empty person longed to make the planet better with bombs and bullets. The scale of his failure, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still not fully clear, but it is colossal, a pyramid of human skulls as big as the Millennium Dome.

Yet while Marine ‘A’ awaits news of his sentence, and prepares for prison, the Blair Creature wanders the world in luxury, advising despots on good governance and trousering enormous fees for greasy little speeches, pausing only to buy more property.

The Chilcot Inquiry, which ought at least to have shown Blair publicly for what he is, is stalled, perhaps forever. It seems it may never report properly. This is because British officials are blocking the release of documents recording exchanges between Blair and ex-President George W. Bush.

We are now being told this is the Americans’ fault. Perhaps it really is. But why are the men who actually created these wars allowed to hide their private conversations, when the unwise remarks of sergeants and privates can be used in evidence against them, to fling them into jail?

The next time you see Mr Blair wearing a poppy, or see any politician simpering about our ‘wonderful Armed Forces’, remember this. Those who did Blair’s bidding end up dead or maimed, or on trial, ruined and in prison cells. He remains whole, at liberty and rich.

Is a new Royal Train steaming into sight?

Maybe the Royal Train can after all be saved by steam, as I urged the other day.

The people who built the superb new British steam engine Tornado tell me the Queen has given them permission to name a planned new engine The Prince of Wales in honour of Charles’s birthday.

It’s a replica Gresley P2, for those who understand these things.

One of the reasons nasty people like the metric system is that it destroys landmarks and helps them bamboozle the customer. When jam and marmalade were sold by the pound, you could tell when the makers were raising the price.

Now they’re sold by the gram, they quietly shrink the jar instead. And last week, Mars and Cadbury cut the size of Christmas boxes of chocolates (once a reliable two pounds), ‘while keeping prices the same’. That is, they’ve sneakily raised the price.

A big grey shadow is stalking Dave

Is Sir John Major planning a comeback? The terrible thing is that it is not unthinkable.

The talent pool of British politics is shallow and depleted, and full of small croaking creatures so slimy that you can’t tell if they’re frogs or toads. As a result, Sir John now looks like a gigantic figure.

The father of the Cones Hotline and railway privatisation is mysteriously said to be a ‘decent guy’ when his life history suggests he is a master of cunning and a betrayer of promises.

If I were Mr Cameron, I’d be watching out for him.

Sir John is outraged by our lack of social mobility. He seems to blame this on the independent schools. How odd. Britain’s comprehensive state school system, whose main aim is to make us more equal, condemns most of its young victims to exclusion from the elite, while the private schools, whose main aim is still education, waft their lucky products straight on to society’s upper deck.

An intelligent person (are there any in politics?) would understand the real reason, the closure of hundreds of state grammar schools 40 years ago. Labour started this, but Tory governments smashed up hundreds of fine schools from 1970 to 1974 – and then between 1979 and 1997 failed to reopen a single one. Now it would be illegal to do so (one of the laws we actually enforce).

If Sir John wants social mobility, he can find it in Northern Ireland, where a fully selective grammar school system still exists.

There, children from the lower social classes have a much better chance (roughly a third greater) of getting to university than their equivalents on the mainland.

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13 November 2013 3:54 PM

If I could, I would write an article at least once a week calling for the return of state grammar schools. But unlike Emile Zola, who wrote about nothing but the unjust imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus for years until justice was done, I don’t own my own newspaper. So I wait for a good opportunity. And one has just arrived.

The fact is that there is huge public demand for selective state education, which has no significant ally or spokesman at Westminster or in Whitehall. It is up to people such as me to express it, and I like to think that years of hammering away have brought the issue much further up the agenda than it was 15 years ago.

But there is still no obvious shift. Despite the occasional wisp of smoke from below the decks, the issue has yet to burst into flames. Why? All the major political parties, and the official elite, are committed to comprehensive state schooling. All of them, having been captured by Gramscian revolutionary thought some years ago, are dogmatically wedded to ‘equality of outcome’, a policy which demands aggressive egalitarianism in education.

At least, they are wedded to it for everyone except themselves, and the super-rich oligarchs who finance their dead parties. Politicians know all the tricks for getting their children into secretly selective schools, closed to non-insiders, or they buy their way into the catchment areas of better schools, or they pay fees, as do the Oligarchs and plutocrats. In all cases, this means they do not really understand the terrible position of bright children from poor families, or care about it. I read the other day that Anthony Blair’s youngest child is now attending a London Roman Catholic ‘comprehensive’. There seems to be some general reluctance to say which school this is, so I shall stay silent. But the school involved is ‘comprehensive’ in the same way that Ten Downing Street is an ‘inner-city terraced house’ – the description is technically correct, but otherwise deeply misleading.

This miserable hypocritical, self-serving egalitarianism - not some empty piffle about public ownership which was a dead letter 50 years ago- is Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’. Not only has Labour never abandoned it . The other parties have adopted it too.

Some politicians are perhaps not bright enough to grasp this. One of them is probably Sir John Major, the supposed ‘decent man’ and ‘nice guy’ (really?) who mysteriously rose to the top of politics (by not being Margaret Thatcher or Michael Heseltine), mysteriously won a general election( by not being Neil Kinnock), and was (nominally at least) Prime Minister for an incredible seven years, only ceasing to hold the office because he wasn’t Anthony Blair.

Now (and one has to wonder why this is) he seems anxious to remind us all that he also isn’t David Cameron. So this account of a speech he gave on the 8th November somehow found its way on to the front of a Tory newspaper on the following Monday. I wonder how. Sir John is not inconsiderably distressed to find that Britain is in the grip of a privately-educated elite. Has he only just realised this? What was he actually doing when he was occupying all those great offices of state? What has he been doing since? Watching the cricket?.

Ludicrously, Sir John blames this bipartisan catastrophe on Labour. Perhaps he doesn’t know that his own Tory Party supervised the destruction of hundreds of fine grammar schools under Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher instead of saving them. But he must surely know that he didn’t reopen a single one of them in his seven long years as Britain’s helmsman, instead concentrating on an irrelevant scheme to create so-called ‘Grant-Maintained’ schools, which did nothing to address the real problem. He must also know that the softening and dilution of the examination system was largely achieved by Tory governments.

The newspaper which trumpeted Sir John’s outburst (see below) has corrected in its online version the claim made in the print version that Sir John attended a comprehensive school, when in fact he went to a grammar school (Rutlish School). One wonders what would have become of the young Major if he really had gone to a comprehensive. But it retains the misleading statement that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, ‘went to state school’, when in fact Mr Gove won a scholarship to a private school, Robert Gordon’s College, where he received the most important part of his education. How interesting that a Tory newspaper should get into such a muddle. It used to be considered politically advantageous for Labour politicians to claim to have been less grandly-educated than they had been. Now it’s the egalitarian Tories who do this, notably Mrs Theresa May, who went to a Convent School, and then to a girls’ grammar school which became a comprehensive while she was there (presumably retaining a grammar stream for the existing grammar pupils, as this was standard procedure at the time) , but says in a major reference book that she went to a ‘comprehensive’.

This is very interesting and an encouraging sign. But my main business is with Mr Harris and with his comrade-in-arms, Owen Jones (‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’), who stormed on to Twitter to declare : 'Anyone who thinks grammar schools would improve social mobility needs to do their homework. They make things worse.’

Ah, now, do they, though? Regular readers here will know the trick that is being pulled by these two. But do Mr Harris or Mr Jones grasp that their argument is hollow?

The most significant concentration of remaining grammar schools in England (there are now none in Scotland or Wales) is in Kent and Buckinghamshire.

Both these counties are within commuting distance of London (Other London commuter Counties, such as Oxfordshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Hampshire and Berkshire, have very few grammar schools or no grammar schools at all). The same is true of the outer London boroughs. It is therefore both rational and practicable for families whose breadwinners work in London to plan their lives so as to give themselves access to grammar schools. (In most parts of the UK no such planning is possible, as grammar schools are a remote memory). Given that the cost of five years of private single-sex secondary day-school education (comparable to a grammar school education) is roughly £100,000 of post tax income, it is not surprising that parents who value schooling do the following:

1.Buy houses in the catchment areas of grammar schools.

2. Spend money on preparatory school and tutor fees to ensure that their children pass the grammar school examinations. In this, by the way, they are comparable to the many left-wing (but non-RC, for leftist Roman Catholics have another way out) London parents who boast that they use state schools, but spend fortunes on private tutoring to make up for the inadequacies of their children’s bog-standard comprehensives (so also making those schools appear a good deal better than they really are at results time).

But Mr Harris doesn’t seem worried by this equally important distortion. Nor is he worried by the behaviour of left-wing luminaries (some of them zealous and noisy campaigners against selection by ability) who move into the tiny and expensive catchment areas of certain nominal comprehensives in North London, which are in effect selective schools. If Mr Harris gets in touch with me, I’ll suggest some lines of inquiry.

As for the grammars, this siege of catchment areas, and the linked systematic targeted cramming of course completely distort school provision. But it is a *consequence* of the closure of hundreds of other grammar schools, not a criticism of the existence of the remaining 164, whose continuing survival is loathed by the comprehensive campaigners, because it emphasises the utter and unquestionable failure of the comprehensive project in educational terms.

When we had a national selective system, state primaries routinely prepared children for the eleven-plus (which readers here will know I would like to replace with an agreed assessment, on the lines of the ones used in Germany, coupled with more flexibility about the age of transfer). There was no need for people to move house or splurge on tutors.

Mr Jones, meanwhile, needs to do *his* homework on the subject of social mobility. People such as me are calling for a reintroduction of a national selective system. The inevitable failure of a localised, pressurised selective system to promote social mobility does not in any way refute our case.

The first bit of homework he needs to do is geography. Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom(just) and still has a wholly selective secondary school system (just, despite the efforts of Sinn Fein to kill it off).

I contacted the Higher Education Statistics Agency (an independent body set up by the universities) in Cheltenham, and asked them for the latest figures on the proportion of lower-income entrants to Higher Education institutions, broken up into the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. .

This, it seemed to me, would be a good indication of the effect of grammar schools on social mobility, because we could see directly how well lower-income children did in university entrance, in a system which was wholly selective, as against three systems which were either wholly comprehensive or almost entirely comprehensive.

I can see no objections to this as a good, objective test of the matter.

So, in 2011/2012 the proportion of young full-time first degree entrants, from socio-economic class 4 to 7*, to Higher Education institutions were as follows.

(*National Statistics Socio-Economic Classes)

England…30.9% (Largely comprehensive)

Wales…..29.1% (Totally comprehensive)

Scotland….26.6% (Totally comprehensive)

Northern Ireland…..39.1% (Almost wholly selective)

The UK average is 30.7%

England and Wales combined 30.8%

So the university chances of a child from a poor background in selective Northern Ireland are almost one third greater than those of a similar child in largely comprehensive England and Wales, and the advantage of Northern Ireland over totally comprehensive Scotland is greater still.

It took me about 45 minutes to obtain these figures. But of course that is because I was already aware of the Northern Ireland exception, which is for many reasons unwelcome to the Comprehensive Zealots. Mr Harris is clearly aware that the Province still has grammar schools, as he mentions it. But he is interested only in the measure of how many pupils receive free school meals.

This is of course significant. But it is not the whole point. It would hardly be surprising if the middle classes, with their bookish homes and educated parents who value education and understand how it works, *dominated* grammar schools. Such schools do not represent a Maoist new dawn of total equality. The point is that in a selective system they dominate them by *merit* and by *ability*, not by paying fees or buying expensive houses. And that the schools they dominate also retain an open door to bright children whose parents do not have these advantages, a door which is not closed against poor homes by bars of gold.

That is the best we can hope for, and it is much better than the selection by influence, faith, secret knowledge or raw unadorned money, which we now have.

The second bit of homework Owen Jones needs to do is History. I wish I could reproduce the whole chapter I wrote on this subject in my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’. But any good library will find it for you for a trifling fee (the relevant chapter is called ’The Fall of the Meritocracy’).

This traces the blatantly political, and egalitarian origin of the comprehensive idea as developed by Graham Savage. It also reproduces the figures from the (1966) Franks Report into Oxford University, which noted that in 1938-9, private school pupils had won 62% of places at that University . A further 13% were won by direct grant schools (fine institutions which after 1944 operated as combined grammar schools and independent schools, until stupidly abolished and driven out of the public sector by Labour in 1975 – now they moan that they want the independent sector to ‘help’ state schools, but of course they wouldn’t want that sort of ‘help’, on terms that challenged the comprehensive orthodoxy). And 19% came from other state schools, presumably all grammar schools at that time.

By 1958-9 (14 years after the Butler Education Act created the national selective system), private schools were down to 53%, direct grants up to 15% and state grammars up to 30%. By 1964-5, private schools were down again to 45% , direct grants up to 17% and grammars up to 34%.

(The totals do not add up to 100% because of foreign students and home-educated entrants)

Until Antony Crosland put a stop to this, this was an accelerating, almost revolutionary process. The next year (the last recorded by Franks) private schools were at 41%, direct grants at 17% and grammars up to 40%. Michael Beloff, a former President of Trinity College, Oxford has said that the state schools were supplying 70% of new entrants to Oxford by the early 1970s, just as the grammar schools began to disappear in large numbers, but (though it seems perfectly possible on the basis of the figures I do have) I have not been able to verify this.

Note that the grammars and direct grants stormed Oxford (and Cambridge) in the 1950s and 1960s, without any special provision or concessions, despite the great advantage the private schools had in those days in the teaching of Classics (then essential for Oxbridge entrance). Now, Oxbridge colleges struggle to raise their state intake by all kinds of concessions, striving to fulfil egalitarian quotas, and as a result give huge advantages to applicants from the remaining grammars, religious schools, elite sixth-form colleges and covertly selective ‘comprehensives’ which are in truth selective, but not in fair or open fashion.

Mr Harris and Mr Jones are very welcome to reply here at length if they wish.